Buy Yourself a DVR

That's a Digital Video Recorder. If you don’t have one and you watch more than an hour of television a week, get one.

Right now.

I’m serious. Go to Dish Network or Direct TV or Comcast or Cox and buy one.

Today.

Great. Now that we have that out of the way, you can share in one of the very few frustrations I have with them.

Back in the day, I think it was TBS that started everything 5 minutes late. Bewitched reruns were on at 1:35. The Jefferson’s were on at 5:05. This is like 20 years ago, and somewhere along the line TBS stopped this inane practice. I don’t know the reasoning for it then, but all of the sudden, TV networks are doing it again. But now they are doing it irregularly.

Nip/Tuck is starting at 8:10. Rescue Me is running 5 minutes long. So, if I’ve gone through the time to set my DVR to record the season of Rescue Me during its first-run time slot, and FX decides to run it 5 minutes long, my DVR will miss the last five minutes.

Sadly, I’ve spent some time trying to figure out the possible reasons for the networks to do this. I’ve some up with two.

1. Networks are tired of people like me who were enjoying their
good programming but skipping their program-supporting
sponsors’ commercials. So, they just want to mess with me
and cut off the shows climax/cliffhanger.
2. Networks wanted to milk another few minutes of advertising
from the first run of their expensive original shows.

Possible-reason number one is a bit of a stretch, I agree. But I think I’m on to something with number two. Because if I watch an encore presentation (i.e. Rerun) of that same Rescue Me episode the next night, it amazingly fits into the standard one-hour time slot. Partially because of chumps like me who skip all those great commercials anyway, I’m thinking traditional ad revenues aren’t worth as much as they once were at the same time as the shows themselves are costing more and more. So, why not try to score some more ad dollars by inserting more ad minutes in the middle of your most popular shows?

And check this out. My Mom, who has digital cable, called me the other night because she noticed she wasn’t able to skip the commercials on the DVR-recorded TNT show Saved. I’ve not experienced this yet, but it seems threats might be coming to fruition. They are going to force us to watch the commercials.

Just when I come up with a way to watch more TV in less time, they pull me back in. This is not what I wanted!